She followed him, and as he started up the stairs toward the second floor, she said, “Why not down here?”
He stopped, turned, looked down at her. “The shutters have fallen or been torn off almost all the windows on the first floor. If we staged it down there, the lights would be visible outside the house. We might attract someone. Other kids. They might interrupt us before we’ve gotten what we want out of Roy. Some of the rooms on the second floor still have all their shutters.”
“If something goes wrong,” she said, “it would be easier to get away from him if we were on the first floor.”
“Nothing’s going to go wrong,” he said. “Besides, we’ve got the gun. Remember?” He patted the box that he was carrying under his right arm.
He started up the steps again and was relieved to hear her following him.
The second-floor hall was gloomy, and the room he was interested in was dark except for threads of late-afternoon sun around the edges of the bolted shutters. He switched on one of the flashlights.
He had chosen a large bedroom just to the left of the head of the stairs. Ancient, yellowed wallpaper was peeling off the walls and hanging in long loops across the ceiling, like old bunting left over from a festive occasion a hundred years ago. The room was dusty and smelled vaguely of mildew, but it wasn’t littered with rubble as many of the other chambers were; there were only scattered pieces of lath and a few chunks of plaster and a couple of ribbons of wallpaper on the floor along the far wall.
He handed Heather the flashlight and put down the box. He picked up the second light, turned it on, and propped it against the wall so that the beam shone up at the ceiling and was reflected back down.
“It’s a spooky place,” Heather said.
“There’s nothing to be scared of,” Colin said.
He took the tape recorder out of the box and placed it on the floor, near the wall that was opposite the door. He gathered up some of the rubble and carefully arranged it over the small machine, letting only the head of the microphone in the open, and concealing even that in a shadowy little pocket of tangled wallpaper.
“Does it look natural?” he asked.
“I guess so.”
“Look at it closely.”
She did. “It’s okay. It doesn’t look arranged.”
“You can’t see the recorder at all?”
“No.”
He retrieved the second flashlight and shone it on the pile of trash, looking closely for a glint of metal or plastic, a reflection that would betray the trick.
“Okay,” he said at last, satisfied with his work. “I think it’ll fool him. He probably won’t even give it a second look.”
“Now what?” she asked.
“We’ve got to make you look like you’ve been roughed up a bit,” Colin said. “Roy won’t believe a word of it unless you look like you put up a struggle.” He took the squeeze bottle of ketchup out of the box.
“What’s that for?”
“Blood.”
“Are you serious?”
“I’ll admit it’s trite,” Colin said. “But it ought to be effective.”
He squeezed some of the ketchup onto his fingers, then artfully smeared it along her left temple, matting her golden hair with it.
She winced. “Yuch.”
Colin stepped back a couple of feet and studied her. “Good,” he said. “It’s a little too bright right now. Too red. But when it dries a bit, it ought to look just about like the real thing.”
“If we’d really struggled, like you’re going to tell him we did, then I’d be rumpled and dirty,” she said.
“Right.”
She pulled her blouse half out of her shorts. She stooped, wiped her hands over the dust-covered floor, and made long sooty marks on her shorts and blouse.
When she stood up, Colin regarded her critically, looking for the false note, trying to see her as Roy would see her. “Yeah. That’s better. But maybe one more thing might help.”
“What’s that?”
“If the sleeve of your blouse was torn.”
She frowned. “It’s one of my better blouses.”
“I’ll pay for it.”
She shook her head. “No. I said I’d help. I’m in this all the way. Go ahead. Tear it.”
He jerked on the material on both sides of her left shoulder seam, jerked once, twice, three times. The stitching finally parted with a nasty sound, and the sleeve sagged on her arm, torn half away.
“Yeah,” he said. “That sure does it. You’re very, very convincing.”
“But now that I’m such a mess, will he want anything to do with me?”
“It’s funny …” Colin stared at her thoughtfully. “In a strange way, you’re even more appealing than you were before.”
“Are you sure? I mean, I’m all dirty. And I wasn’t all that fabulous when I was clean.”
“You look great,” he assured her. “Just right.”
“But if this is going to work, he really has to want to … well … he has to want to rape me. I mean, he’ll never get the chance. But he has to want to.”
Again, Colin was acutely aware of the danger into which he was putting her, and he didn’t like himself very much.
“There’s just one more thing I can do that might help,” she said.
Before he realized what she intended, she grasped the front of her blouse and tugged hard on it. Buttons popped; one of them struck Colin’s chin. She tore the blouse open all the way, and for an instant he saw one small, beautiful, quivering breast and a dark nipple, but then the halves of the blouse fell part of the way together again, and he could see nothing more than the soft, sweet swell of flesh that marked the beginning of her breasts.
He looked up, met her eyes.
She was blushing fiercely.
For a long moment neither of them spoke.
He licked his lips. His throat was suddenly parched.
At last, trembling, she said, “I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t help much to have my blouse open a little. I mean, I don’t have much to show.”
“Perfect,” he said weakly. “It’s the perfect touch.” He looked away from her, went to the cardboard box, and picked up the coil of rope.
“I wish I didn’t have to be tied up,” she said.
“There’s no other way,” he said. “But you won’t really be tied. Not tightly. The rope will just be wrapped around your wrists a few times; it won’t be knotted there. You’ll be able to get your hands free in a flash. And where there are knots, they’ll be the kind that slip open easily. I’ll show you how. You’ll be able to get out of the ropes in a couple of seconds if you have to. But you won’t have to. He won’t get anywhere near you. He won’t get his hands on you. Nothing will go wrong. I have the gun.”
She sat down on the floor, with her back against the wall. “Let’s get it over with.”
By the time he finished tying her, night had fallen outside, and there were not even threads of light at the unraveling edges of the aging, splintered shutters.
“It’s time to make the phone call,” Colin said.
“I’m going to hate being alone in this place.”
“It’ll only be for a few minutes.”
“Can you leave both flashlights?” she asked.
He was moved by her fear; he knew what it was like. But he said, “Can’t. I’ll need one to get in and out of the house without breaking my neck in the dark.”
“I wish you’d brought three.”
“You’ll have enough light with one,” he said, knowing that it would be pathetically little comfort in this creepy place.
“Hurry back,” she said.
“I will.”